The RE-Member Operator Training Course is a seven-day residential experience designed specifically for Special Operations personnel. Built around peer connection, guided reflection, structured activities, and practical application, the course provides participants with an environment to examine their experiences, strengthen personal awareness, and prepare for the road ahead.
The program is organized around Five Connected Areas: Stability, Story, Identity, Conscience, and Connection. Each area affects the others. Together, they provide a comprehensive framework for understanding the experiences of Special Operations personnel and supporting continued growth beyond the operational environment.
The neurobiological rationale — what combat does to the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex, and how reconsolidation produces measurable change — is covered in full on the Science page. This page is the protocol reference: what we do, how the five areas connect, and how the week is structured.
The RE-Member Operator Training Course is not therapy and is not intended to replace professional services. It is a peer-based program designed to support participants through shared experience, reflection, and connection.
The programming is designed to feel like home, not intervention.
Every culture that has ever prepared men for hard things and brought them home again has used the same three-phase structure. The OTC is built on it.
The threshold is crossed once, and deliberately. Enacted by the Opening Ceremony on Day 1 — a three-act sequence that marks the threshold. The sealed envelope. The single breath. The name-down. First names only from this point forward.
The ordeal phase. Operators in this phase are not yet whole — they are in threshold. Each domain affects the others. This is not curriculum. It is the structure of the ordeal itself.
The operator returns to himself — named, witnessed, and equipped. The sealed envelope comes back. The Parting Glass is raised. What was carried in is carried out differently.
These are not isolated tracks. Each area affects the others.
Before memory can be safely retrieved, before identity can be confronted, before relational exposure can be tolerated — the nervous system has to be stable enough to hold it. D1 establishes that biological precondition. Breathwork, physical training, somatic regulation, and sleep protocol. D1 also identifies each operator's autonomic profile — hyperarousal or hypoarousal — because the two states require different entry points for everything that follows.
Combat compresses experience into survival-encoded fragments. Narrative Dialysis is a structured writing process that converts those fragments into coherent, owner-attributed narrative — restoring the autobiographical self that high-stress environments systematically suppress. It helps you find the words to tell the story.
False identities form wherever fear, shame, or survival pressure shapes a person's sense of self before they have the capacity to examine it. For operators, that process is accelerated and compounded by combat, sustained operational exposure, and moral injury. The operator comes home, but the man who left hasn't been fully accounted for — and the identity running in his place is a lie that feels true. D3 names the false identity, then creates the conditions for the operator to receive his true one — not constructed by the facilitator, but arrived at through the process itself. The false identity is surrendered. The true identity is received.
There is a category of wound that breathwork and narrative cannot reach. The questions that live there — why am I alive and they are not; what do I do with the things I did — are moral questions, not clinical ones. D4 addresses them directly through the Soul-AAR: an After-Action Review structure applied to moral and relational material.
CASE symptoms don't announce themselves at home as combat residue. They present as relational failures — withdrawal, reactivity, emotional absence in situations with no tactical stakes. D5 translates everything processed in D1–D4 into the specific relational and operational context the operator is returning to. He leaves with a Forward Operating Plan, a Battle Buddy, and a framework for moving between who he is in the field and who his family needs him to be.
The RE-Member OTC is a structured, evidence-informed peer-support program — not a clinical treatment program. It does not diagnose, treat, or provide clinical mental health services. The non-clinical framing is not evasion of clinical standards. It is the reason this population engages at all.
The progression mirrors the neurobiological logic of reconsolidation. The five areas overlap across the week, and each one affects the others.
Every cohort enters with a full intake battery — administered and reviewed before Day 1. Outcome instruments are re-administered on Day 6. Planned longitudinal follow-up at 30, 60, and 90 days is part of the course design.
Primary instruments: PCL-5 (PTSD symptom severity), DES-II (dissociative profile), C-SSRS (suicide risk screen), and MISS-M (moral injury, military-specific)
The full evidence base and outcome rationale is on the Science page ›
The RE-Member OTC is provided at no cost to every operator and family member who attends. No registration fee. No gear requirements. No out-of-pocket expenses of any kind.
PGF covers travel, lodging, meals, and all program materials. The only thing we ask is that you show up. Everything else is handled.
This is funded work — sustained by donors and partners who believe that the people who carried the hardest assignments deserve access to what actually works, without a price tag attached to it. If you would like to help us keep the cost at zero, please consider a tax-deductible donation.
Participation in the RE-Member OTC is by referral through unit leadership, partner organizations, or command-connected networks. PGF does not run open applications. Cohort composition is deliberate — built to serve the mission and produce valid, comparable outcome data.
Organizations interested in establishing a referral relationship for their personnel are welcome to reach out through the Collaborate page.